| WSAZ-TV weatherman Tony Cavlier says November 2015 goes into the books as a top 4 and 6th warmest (Charleston, Huntington respectively) since weather records were kept in our area.
That's a more than 115 year database that goes back to the days of Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders in the late 1800s.
Every hour this past month, the temperature averaged 5 degrees warmer than normal and a whopping 12 degrees warmer than the frigid November of 2014.
While the warmth of November can be partly attributed to the warm Pacific Ocean effect known as El Nino, the notorious effects from El Nino will not be felt until January and February locally, he says.
The month was also very dry garnering well under 2" of rain over the 30 day period with almost half of that falling in the last 3 days.
Now it is onto December when the EL NINO pattern should begin to slowly exert an even stronger influence.
With a snow pack building daily across Northern Canada and adjacent Northern Asia (including Siberia), the task in predicting if and when the arctic air over the tundra region will plunge south is at hand.
But loops of the temperature trends in these northern areas show one constant idea; namely, instead of air masses coming in from the polar regions, the pattern for much of December will feature Pacific Ocean storms and air masses crossing the country from the Northwest into the Rockies and then off to the east.
These chilled air masses will have a "maritime" history in their bloodlines. And maritime air is not known for bitter cold or snowstorms.
The weatherman says no sooner will it get colder (with perhaps a dusting of snow) that warmer air will flood much of the USA again rendering the snow pack in the east much less than a normal December.
For the month of December:
1. A warmer than normal month which will add to our home heating bill savings.
2. A lack of December snow for a second straight year (recall we were shutout last December). This diminishes the chance of a White Christmas this year (of course our normal chances range 25-30% anyway).
3. The warmer air can be mischievous, so some type of extreme or record event seems plausible. Recall how the 1982 El Nino produced a record high of 76 on Christmas Day.
4. Salt supplies will show a surplus as measurable snows will be hard to come by.
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